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NASCAR hitches ride to social media, technology

USA TODAY Sports spent a Saturday night inside the Fan and Media Engagement Center to observe how it operated during what traditionally is one of the season's most frenetic races -- the Bristol Night Race.

CHARLOTTE — It was an old-school confrontation viewed through a new-world prism.

As Kevin Harvick leaned into Denny Hamlin's cockpit for the sort of contretemps that has sparked passion among stock-car fans for decades, there was empirical evidence the impact of the contentious conversation wasn't confined to the pits at Bristol Motor Speedway.

On a 47-inch flatscreen monitor inside a room with postmodern deco and glass walls anchoring the eighth floor of NASCAR's high-rise headquarters in uptown Charlotte, chatter was spiking around the world.

A multicolored line graph labeled "social conversation" leapt to life as if it were hooked to an ECG monitor — except this was measuring the heart rate of NASCAR Nation.

At 10:32 p.m., as Harvick marched toward Hamlin's car, the chart displayed 446 NASCAR-related mentions across social media — roughly twice as many as any point during the previous 90 minutes. In the next minute, there were 461. At 10:34 p.m., it tracked 583 mentions — the highest number during the race.

Sean Doherty, NASCAR's director of digital and social media engagement, smiled and leaned back in a swivel chair behind a console that faced a bank of laptops and workstations aligned at angles resembling a miniature mission control.

"Can you recheck to see if we're trending on Twitter now?" he asked.

Edwin Colmenares paused from answering fans on a Tweetdeck application and confirmed that #NASCAR had entered the national trend list, noting it for a report that would be compiled and distributed to chairman Brian France, president Mike Helton and several other senior executives a few hours after the checkered flag.

This is how the race for information unfolds inside NASCAR's new Fan and Media Engagement Center, where every morsel of Twitter and Facebook action — 107,946 social media mentions in the case of Bristol's race day — is tracked, collected and catalogued in hopes of better navigating the information age.

"The analysis that you can deliver is a function of how much data you have," Doherty said. "We use a metaphor that it's like an empty swimming pool filling with data; and as you get more water in the pool, you will be able to dive deeper on analysis and insight."

USA TODAY Sports spent a Saturday night inside the Fan and Media Engagement Center during the Irwin Tools Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway to observe how the FMEC operated during what traditionally is one of the season's most frenetic races.

As NASCAR battles to maintain relevance amidst dwindling attendance and flat TV ratings, it's become more attuned to its fan base, and the FMEC, which opened in January and made its race debut with the Sprint Unlimited exhibition at Daytona International Speedway, is built to ingest as much feedback as possible.

Hewlett Packard built the proprietary software platform through its Autonomy analytics program, which is designed to weed out NASCAR-related tweets and posts. HP also helped construct the dizzying array of 13 47-inch hi-definition monitors that can be configured via touchscreen technology in myriad ways for watching Twitter, Facebook and TV feeds (which can be viewed in a nine-screen display that would be the envy of any sports bar).

Monitors inside NASCAR's Fan and Media Engagement Center display footage from the Irwin Tools Night Race as well as real-time social media and various analytic tools.(Photo: USA TODAY Sports Images)

But the center essentially is a listening post for cyberspace.

"Our fans want to be heard and we want to hear them," NASCAR chief communications officer Brett Jewkes said. "This tool helps us do that in real time."

Though built and operated by NASCAR, the FMEC also could become an important asset for sponsors weighing the impact of their investments and teams lobbying to prove drivers are worthy of attracting multimillion-dollar deals. Hendrick Motorsports recently started its own social media command center, and team president Marshall Carlson said sponsors have shown a keen interest in the impact of social media.

"This platform allows us to understand the conversations happening and the entire industry to get the information and react to it," chief marketing officer Steve Phelps said. "If it's new sponsors, we'll know how much the media is picking them up, or if the fans recognized it or understood it. It allows real-time analytics for race teams, sponsors and tracks."

Josh Pelz, head of digital for the Engine Shop sports and marketing agency that has handled social media launches for FIFA, said the ubiquitous nature of Twitter and Facebook and the corresponding manner the sites are digested makes engaging with them imperative.

"The conversation is happening, and if you don't engage in it, there are so many things that can go wrong," Pelz said. "There's misinformation out there, someone says something is happening that's not, you want to correct it, or if someone says something amazing about your brand, you want to rebroadcast that message to your community. If a fan of NASCAR is saying how much he loves this aspect of a race or a driver, rebroadcasting that message is way more valuable than you originating that message, because it's the community members and what they're saying that really is the secret to social media."

Tracking the race and the drivers

There are at least two people manning the FMEC on race days, and Colmenares, a coordinator, and senior manager Kendra Metz arrive a couple hours before the green flag for the Bristol race.

NASCAR tracks all Sprint Cup, Nationwide and Camping World Truck series races live, but a four-person staff also rotates in keeping the FMEC staffed weekly during business hours and also on evenings when there are team or sponsor announcements and industry events that might drive Internet discussion.

The primary category is labeled "social conversation," which compiles all mentions in a mammoth database that can be segmented into granular searches. In addition to the obvious hashtags (#nascar) and driver Twitter handles (such as @JimmieJohnson), the search also includes hashtags for drivers who aren't on Twitter (i.e. #Smoke or #TonyStewart, #DaleJr) as well as nicknames for those who are ("#Rowdy," in addition to @KyleBusch). Variations also are tracked for sponsors whose names could be altered (e.g., M&Ms without the usage of an ampersand).

The parameters also can be set to search for NASCAR tweets based on follower counts — useful for compiling lists such as which celebrities were active during the Daytona 500.

Some searches are trickier, such as when fan reaction to a new long-term deal with NBC required knocking out general comments about the network.

"When we do a deep dive, it's like a really advanced Google search where we look for certain terms but not others," Doherty said. "We cast as wide a net as possible but filter the relevant data."

It still yields a stack of information too voluminous to process without the help of the HP program to winnow it into digestible form. In the 10 hours before the Bristol race, there were 33,477 social media mentions, and more than 70,000 during the race.

The traffic tracks at about 50 mentions per minute 40 minutes before the green flag. It builds to triple digits during the driver introductions (which feature Bristol's special twist of songs picked by the stars) and spikes to 250 at 7:35 p.m. for the national anthem (sung by the children of drivers and crew members) and more than 400 at 7:43 p.m. as Michael Buffer gives a "Let's Get Ready to Rumble!" command to start engines.

"This is getting constant reaction for a prerace," Metz said as Colmenares chuckled.

WATCH: Driver introductions from Bristol

Sitting beside each other and separated by a stack of legal pads and three smartphones, Colmenares and Metz are watching the race spread across four screens in the upper right and surrounded by screens displaying line grafs of data related to four primary streams of topics —social conversation, the ABC broadcast, NASCAR digital media and Bristol. A fifth monitor in the upper left is dedicated to the live box score of the race showing running order, caution flags and lap leaders.

There are two audio feeds — the TV broadcast and the NASCAR officials scanner channel so the staff is aware of caution flags and able to monitor fans' reaction. If there is confusion about the reason for a yellow, Doherty said the FMEC staff will communicate to on-site NASCAR PR, who can relay it to the scoring tower and broadcast booth.

Metz's job is to measure trends during the race through a combination of manual and automatic means. Because the Bristol race was pre-empted in several markets by an NFL game, a search is created for fans complaining they are having trouble finding the broadcast, and a report on the chatter is dispatched to the PR department as the race begins.

Postrace analysis finds the negative perception of the broadcast grew by 11% over the previous race because of the confusion and a spate of late commercials, which always are tracked as a separate category in fan sentiment.

"We have set topics, but if something spikes or a trend gains traction, we'll run a quick search and throw a chart on the wall to keep tabs on it as part of the overall conversation," Doherty said.

Doherty said there are some graphs where low activity is good. The NASCAR Digital Media stays flat during Bristol, which means fans probably aren't having many problems with NASCAR.com applications.

Four screens are devoted to tracking driver-oriented conversations, which sometimes yield surprising results. Though Dale Earnhardt Jr. leads 32 laps during Bristol, he doesn't rank among the most mentioned in the race. The top five are Jeff Gordon (30% of top-five driver mentions), Kasey Kahne (25%), Matt Kenseth (19%), Kevin Harvick (14%) and Jimmie Johnson (12%).

The interest in Kenseth and Kahne is driven by their side-by-side fight for the win in the final 10 laps (which draws a high of 434 mentions at 10:49 p.m.).

WATCH: Nail-Biting finish between Kenseth and Kahne

Though he wasn't as much a factor at Bristol (finishing seventh), Gordon generally ranks at or near the top. The FMEC staff credits it to his Twitter account posting lots of updates that draw retweets and comments.

"There's a lot of people cheering him on and commenting when he gets in incidents," Metz said. "Generally, he is the most talked about driver throughout a race."

Engaging and identifying with fans

The first incident involving a star driver sends the #nascar column spinning like a roulette wheel as media, fans and team accounts respond to a collision between Brad Keselowski and David Reutimann in the pits.

Colmenares, who is tracking @nascar, #nascar, #BristolNightRace, @bmsupdates among others via Tweetdeck, answers a question from the @nascar account on whether a penalty will be issued. Interaction is his primary duty during the race, and he tries to answer about a question per minute (typically related to drivers' positions).

"People love it; they retweet and say, 'NASCAR tweeted me!' " Colmenares said. "That's what I like to see."

"We're trying to be better with this resource of showing behind-the-scenes content and trying to talk back with fans on social," Doherty said. "It's always been outbound in the past, but this is more the direction we are going. Several iterations later, it could be driving the traffic and setting goals for tweets. But version 1.0 of this platform is about monitoring."

That's evident in an 11-page report on the Bristol race distributed throughout the industry five days later. The event shows a 4% increase in total social media mentions from the race day season average, which is slightly more than 103,000. The Daytona 500 was top-ranked with 565,000 mentions followed by the Fontana, Calif., race (which ended with a collision for the lead between Hamlin and Joey Logano and a postrace scuffle involving Tony Stewart at 178,000 mentions).

The postrace report also tracks sentiment about incidents (Hamlin is perceived as the aggressor over Harvick during their brouhaha, which drew an in-race high of 1,079 mentions) and the quality of the race itself.

Phelps, who has been NASCAR's chief marketer since 2005, said the FMEC data should provide an enhanced way of identifying "the narrative around the sport" than the sanctioning body's fan council, a group that has been surveyed weekly for four years.

"This is an entirely broader group to understand what fans are saying and what they believe is important," Phelps said. "We want to create new content for them and through this system. It's going to be a game-changer for us."